Terra Incognita (32 page)

‘Why do women have periods?' it went.

Nobody knew the answer.

‘Because they deserve it!' the man burst out, no longer able to keep this side-splitting information to himself. Everyone laughed.

It was as if I had entered a time capsule and been hurtled back to an age in which Neanderthal man was prowling around on the look-out for mammoths. Later that evening, safely removed from the bar, which I had come to think of as occupied territory, a Byronic youth apprehended me next to the tea urn.

‘I hope you weren't too offended by that joke,' he said.

I couldn't think of anything to say.

‘It does seem to mean a lot to them – I mean, keeping it male,' the man went on. ‘I came down here from Grimsby on the BAS ship. Three women got on at Signy base, and it electrified the atmosphere on board. It sparked the major debate of the whole trip – even some of the young guys were arguing passionately against women down here. By the way, I'm Lucas.' We shook hands, took our tea and sat down at a formica table. Lucas was working for BAS as a summer-only field assistant, and felt ‘at one remove' from the community at Rothera.

‘Why on earth do they feel so strongly about it?' I asked.

He hesitated. ‘They don't want the complication of a female in such a pristine place,' he said eventually. ‘It's visceral.'

I didn't need to be told that. I felt it every day.

‘Were the Americans like it too?' he asked.

‘Er, no.'

‘I suppose you have to remember that the majority of support staff here sign on for a two-and-a-half year tour of duty. It's a long time to live on an Antarctic base. Attitudes get entrenched.'

‘The support staff seem very young here,' I said. ‘Much younger than they are in other programmes.'

‘Well, they are. Twenty isn't an uncommon age. You can't get a man to leave a wife and kids for two-and-a-half years.'

‘They seem to find it hard to cope with outsiders . . .'

‘There aren't any outsiders except you! They've never had a writer here before.'

It was as if I had moved into a family home and tried to pretend I was a relative. It wasn't fair to blame them for it. There was a highly developed sense of ownership among the British. The incumbents owned the base, figuratively, just as in their heads they owned ‘their' bit of the continent. Besides the fact that most support staff were deployed for such a long period, the scientists were all employed by BAS. They worked in the same building in Cambridge, saw each other on the ice year after year, and were imbued with the same culture. Other Antarctic programmes worked with scientists from a wide variety of universities and external institutions, but BAS people were all members of the same club. There was an exclusivity about Rothera. It was in part a function of size, at least when compared with its larger American counterpart, which had gone as far as institutionalising writers and artists. To a greater extent, however, it was a function of historical continuity. BAS had been in the Antarctic longer than any other programme. The cultural differences between Britain and America in Antarctica had revealed themselves to me before I got further south than Cambridge or Virginia. At the orientation conferences the gloom of Girton College and cosy nights in the cellar bar were centuries away from the antiseptic vastness of the Xerox Document University. While BAS tried hard to introduce modern methodology to the training programme, with the result that at Girton we dutifully sat in small groups in front of flipcharts in sessions called Lifestyle, it symbolised a nod in the direction of progress, and when we had to use the flipchart to write a list of potential sources of conflict on base, Sexual Harassment was followed by Not Enough Sexual Harassment, and Farting was noted.

To me, the notion of shutting people out betrayed everything Antarctica represented. The women who had breached the BAS defences had fought hard, and minor battles had been won. The institutional subscription to
Mayfair
magazine was no longer provided by the benign employer and left on Rothera's coffee tables. There were many wars still to be fought, however. Men had always wanted to keep Antarctica for themselves, and since the Norwegian Caroline Mikkelsen became the first woman to set foot on the continent on 20 February 1935, the cause had advanced with the speed of a vegetable garden. Only the American programme has taken the matter seriously, and yet, in 1995, still only 61 of the 244 winterers at McMurdo were female.

Sir Vivien Fuchs wrote in his book
Of Ice and Men
, published in 1982, ‘Problems will arise should it ever happen that women are admitted to base complement', and when I sat drinking tea with him at his house in Cambridge on a muggy Monday afternoon before I left England he suggested helpfully that the answer was to put women in all-female camps. In September 1966, an article in the American
Antarctic
magazine ran a headline ‘
Women
t
Worries
', and Admiral Reedy said breezily to a reporter from the same journal two years later that Antarctica would remain ‘the womanless white continent of peace'. Rear-Admiral George Dufek, an early commander of U.S. operations on the ice, summed it up when he said, ‘I think the presence of women would wreck the illusion of the frontiersman – the illusion of being a hero.'

The Soviets brought the first female non-wife south in 1957, and two years later the Australian programme followed suit. One of the first Australian women selected wrote later, ‘We were invaders in a man's realm and we were regarded with suspicion.' The Americans sent the first four women south as programme participants in 1969, inciting the memorable headline, ‘
Powder Puff Explorers Invade the South Pole
'. When the first two females finally wintered at McMurdo in 1974 the programme managers weren't taking any chances – one was a nun, and the other ‘mature', which meant (they hoped) past the age at which she could inflame the passions even of desperate men.

The American Harry Darlington took his wife south in 1946 when he was chief pilot and third-in-command of Finn Ronne's expedition to Stonington Island. He had met Jennie when she fed his husky a bone, and the dog went on to be their only wedding guest. When it was suggested that Ronne and Darlington should take their wives to Stonington, seven members of the expedition signed a petition protesting that it would ‘jeopardise our physical condition and mental balance'. Poor lambs. Even Harry wasn't wild about the idea. ‘It's no place for a woman,' he said. But in the end Jennie had to go, since Ronne insisted on taking Jackie, and the dissenters reckoned two were better than one. So they went. One man commented, ‘The Admiral [Byrd] took along Guernseys. One had a calf. We might do better.'

Jennie had never been further south than Florida, and she was twenty-two when the ship set sail. She packed nail polish, but it froze. ‘To him Antarctica symbolised a haven,' Jennie wrote of her husband, ‘a place of high ideals and that inner peace men find only in an all-male atmosphere in primitive surroundings.' She was accepted in the end, and she learnt to drive the dogs, but probably only because – some good exploring notwithstanding – the expedition turned into a disaster. Relations with the British team camped nearby were strained. (An Englishman who had been in the field for several months and was unaware of Jennie's presence mistook her for a mirage and ran away.) The social fabric of the American team disintegrated into violence, and Harry was relieved of his responsibilities while forced to remain on the ice. Jennie and Jackie watched the men quarrelling, fighting, flouting safety measures, sinking into despair and allowing their personalities to take precedence over the aims of the expedition, and still, in
Man and the Conquest of the Pole,
published in 1964, P. E. Victor wrote of the Ronne saga, ‘The expedition ran into all the difficulties ordinarily caused by the presence of women in such circumstances.' Even this was not quite as imaginative as the efforts of Abraham Cowley, who was caught in a storm in the Southern Ocean in the
Batchelor's Delight
in the 1680s. He concluded in his journal that
talking
about women had caused the storm.

The only other book written by a woman in the early years includes whale recipes and detailed instructions on how to knit bootees for penguins in order to protect polished floors. In the fifties Nan Brown spent two-and-a-half years on South Georgia with her husband, who was a radio operator. The Norwegians took her whaling, and she brought out her knitting on deck. She called her book
Antarctic Housewife
. Nan and Jennie Darlington were both pregnant when they left the ice (nothing else to do but procreate and knit), but the first child born in the vicinity of the continent was supposedly to a waitress aboard a Russian whaler in 1948, and she called the poor infant Antarctic. The Argentinians began bringing spouses south in 1977 to reinforce their territorial claim, and in 1978 one of them obligingly gave birth – though she was flown south seven months pregnant. By 1984 the Chileans were at it too, and they even established a school.

Private expeditions have been even more of a male preserve. The abiding characteristic of many of them seems to be hostility between members – you only have to read what Reinhold Messner wrote about Arved Fuchs, what Will Steger wrote about Geoff Somers, and what Fiennes and Stroud wrote about one another. The American Women's Antarctic Expedition to the South Pole in 1992–3 was refreshingly different. One member wrote afterwards, ‘We each had our hard times and received the caring support of the other three . . . We found that although we got annoyed by some idiosyncrasies, we still valued and needed each individual and the qualities she had to offer the group.'

I am not, of course, suggesting that men are incapable of this kind of loving support (God forbid). It's exactly what Apsley Cherry-Garrard describes in
The Worst Journey in the World
. But it does seem to have disappeared from their repertoire of emotions. I found it unfathomable that, only eighty years after the expedition Cherry describes, things had come to such a pretty pass.

Scott wrote movingly about the value of friendship from the last tent. It was in a letter to J. M. Barrie. ‘I never met a man in my life', wrote the captain, ‘whom I admired and loved more than you, but I never could show you how much your friendship meant to me – for you had much to give and I had nothing.' How many men must have gone to the grave ‘never being able to show', and how much they could learn from Scott's story.

Scott had been wooed by Barrie, creator of the eternally youthful Peter Pan, after returning from his first expedition. Barrie would have loved to have gone south. ‘I want to know what it is really like to be alive,' he had written to Scott. After the tragedy had unfolded on the polar plateau, he identified Scott with Peter. For years he carried Scott's letter around with him, whipping it out at any opportunity. He said, ‘When I think of Scott I remember the strange alpine story of the youth who fell down a glacier and was lost, and of how a scientific companion, one of several who accompanied him, all young, computed that his body would again appear at a certain place and date many years afterwards. When that time came round some of the survivors returned to the glacier to see if the prediction would be fulfilled, all old men now; and the body reappeared as young as on the day he left them. So Scott and his comrades emerge out of the white immensities, always young.'

Scott's son, in later life a distinguished naturalist and conservationist, was named after Barrie's immortal Peter. Barrie was his godfather, and when the boy was five, he took him to see the vastly successful
Peter Pan
. After the performance, Barrie asked him what he had liked best. Peter thought hard. ‘What I liked best', he concluded, ‘was tearing up the programme and dropping the bits on people's heads.'

∗

At sixty-seven degrees south and sixty-eight degrees west, Rothera Point sits at the entrance of Ryder Bay, in the south east of Adelaide Island and about one third of the way down the Antarctic Peninsula. Adelaide Island was discovered and charted by John Biscoe as he weaved in and out of the archipelago alongside the peninsula. On St Valentine's Day 1832, he named it after Queen Adelaide of Sax-Meiningen, queen consort of William IV. The point was surveyed in the 1950s and named after John Michael Rothera, a surveyor for what later became the British Antarctic Survey. It was the haunt of Weddells and the occasional fur seal, as well as a proliferation of Adélies and dominican gulls. The rocks were covered in a type of branchy lichen from a group that exists in the Scottish highlands. Puffs of surf slapped the shore, and in the bay the bergs resembled a scene cut from a marble quarry. The maritime climate gave the continent a different dimension after the fastness of the Ross Ice Shelf.

As I grew familiar with the station, and felt the weight of history behind it, I became aware that something was missing. I couldn't put my finger on it until in the dining room one day I found myself staring at a five-foot wide framed photograph of a working dog team captioned ‘In memory of the old dogs'. The ghosts of the dogs roamed everywhere at Rothera. On the duty-rota board in the dining room, next to the crowded columns headed Night Watch or some other domestic duty, the plastic letters of the Dog Feed column were jumbled in a heap at the bottom of the board. The Dog of the Day hook was still next to the front door, field rations were still called Manfood to distinguish them from Dogfood, and framed photographs of bearded giants gazing adoringly at small fluffy bundles lurked in the most unlikely places.

In 1991 the Antarctic Treaty nations declared that under the terms of the Environmental Protocol to the Treaty the huskies were to be ‘phased out' of Antarctica by April Fool's Day 1994. The breeding programme at Rothera was stopped immediately. BAS had kept dogs continually since 1945, though they had not been used in support of scientific work since 1975. With the arrival of reliable snowmobile travel, the dogs became ever more obsolete and were retained primarily for recreational purposes. In the Rothera archives I found a telex from the Foreign Office, dated 1963, suggesting that breeding should cease since mechanical transport was increasing, and it was scrawled with indignant comments from men on base pointing out that one plane was grounded and the motorised toboggans were stranded while the Spartans, Giants and Moomins were lazing comfortably on their spans outside the door. Besides mechanisation, another argument for the removal of the dogs was the suggestion that they passed on canine distemper to seals, and, more plausibly, that the seal chop necessitated by their voracious appetites was now ‘inappropriate to the environmental aims of scientific organisations within the Antarctic'.